My First Trip to Europe

Dining Hall, Christ Church College, Oxford

I come from people who don’t travel overseas except in uniform. Or in chains. My ancestors came here a long time ago—mostly from England, Scotland, and Ireland—likely in chains. Once here, they pretty much stayed put. And it never occurred to me that I would be among the first to break through the family inertia.

Susie in Oxford Garden

            I worked my way through college in a minimum wage office job. In those days, a person could pay for college that way if she lived at home and went to dollar  movie nights at the university. Me, I was paying my tuition and also saving up money to get my teeth straightened, something my parents couldn’t afford.

            And then my friend Susie suggested that I go with her to Europe.

            She had signed up for an English literature tour through the university, and also planned to travel the Continent on the cheap, with a Eurail pass and a series of  $5 and $10 a night hotels.

            Cheap was still extravagant to me. But I did it anyway. I took that orthodontics money and squandered it on a trip to Europe.

It was the best decision I ever made. It changed my life.

Ralph Sykes and Bus

In England, we traveled in a little bus that could get to those narrow places that history happens. Ralph Sykes Davis was our bus driver and guide to real life. Arthur Kincaid, a doctoral candidate at Christ Church College, was our mentor in all things literary.

Arthur Kincaid

For two weeks, we traveled throughout England. We saw Diana Rigg as Lady Macbeth at the Old Vic in London. We toured Westminster Abbey and paid our respects to the poets in their corner.

I got drunk for the first time. I recall staggering through the streets of Camden Town, heading back to the dorm at the University of London. 

On the Altar Stone, Stonehenge

Leaving London behind, we visited Stratford On Avon, and toured Ann Hathaway’s cottage. We walked the lonely moors in Hardy Country and stood in Keats’s garden. At Canterbury Cathedral, we saw the spot where Thomas Becket was martyred. I still love a good murder story. 

We visited Stonehenge, and I sat on the altar stone and dreamt of old gods and old rituals. We visited Christ Church College, Oxford. You know what the dining hall looks like if you’ve seen the Harry Potter movies.

Ann Hathaway's Cottage

Dungeon Ghyll Hotel

In the Lake District,we stayed in the Old Dungeon Ghyll Hotel, still a hangout for climbers. We visited Dove Cottage, Grasmere, Windermere—all the places immortalized by Wordsworth, Beatrix Potter, Coleridge, and others.

That was decades ago, but I am still mining those experiences. Scenes in The Warrior Heir take place at St. Margaret’s Church, near Westminster Abbey. The magical guilds were born in a fictional spot in the Lake District called Raven’s (Dragon’s) Ghyll—modeled after the Dungeon Ghyll and Raven’s Crag, a pike I climbed with Susie.

It’s a landscape that would turn anyone into a poet. It made me raise my eyes from the ground in front of my feet and see new possibilities. It’s taken a long time to get here, but the journey began in England.

Last week, I went back.

A Visit to Taos Pueblo

While in Taos, New Mexico, for the Kindling Words West writing retreat, I took an afternoon away from writing to visit Taos Pueblo, the oldest continuously-occupied community in the United States. The pueblo was built nearly a thousand years ago by the Taos Pueblo people, thought to be descendants of the extinct Anasazi Tribes from the Four Corners area.
According to the official Website, about 150 people live in the pueblo full time, while about 1900 live on pueblo land in Taos. The entire holding comprises about 99,000 acres, and the elevation of the pueblo is 7200 feet.
Six of us writers arrived at the pueblo in two cars, but Mary Beth and I soon fell behind the others. As we walked in, we were met by an entrepreneurial young girl clutching a fistful of silver bracelets. “How much?” we said. “Five dollars,” she said. And the bargain was struck.
I was enthralled by the architecture, the shadow-blue mountain backdrop, and the crystal clear Red Willow Creek that divides the pueblo into north and south. Splashes of faded color on wooden doors stood out against the adobe browns and golds, contrasting with creamy whitewashed walls.

There were dogs everywhere, too, in weathered pueblo colors—white and brown and tan.
St. Jerome’s Church is a focal point of the pueblo. It was built about 1850 after the U.S. Army destroyed the previous church. Everywhere I looked, Catholicism jostled up against the original kiva religion, but after more than five hundred years, they seem to coexist comfortably.
Some of you may know that I am fascinated by graveyards. The pueblo graveyard was built in and around the ruins of the old church. The burying ground is prickly with wooden crosses decorated with bright plastic flowers and dried corn amulets. A scattering of modern granite tombstones seems out of place. Old clamored against new, creating a delicious tension.

In the shops, we stopped and chatted with painters, leatherworkers, silversmiths, candle and soap makers. Children off school for summer vacation sat in the shade, stringing beads. Some were already sounding the lament of late childhood—I’m BORED. It’s SLOW. Can I go get a DRINK?
Mary Beth immediately bought a drum, which she was forced to carry the rest of our visit. I was tempted by smaller, lighter-weight, more portable items—the silver and turquoise jewelry on display everywhere. We visited Robert Mirabal’s flute and music store, where Mary Beth bought a lovely flute and I bought a CD.

I felt warmly welcomed everywhere I went, and I tried to slow my natural frenetic pace, to settle into chatting and visiting and taking my time. We bought flatbread pastry with prune filling and dodged a few sprinkles that splattered into the dust. One storekeeper peered out of his doorway and said, “This happens every afternoon, and the tourists scatter. It never lasts more than a few minutes.”
Eventually I made my choices—a grandmother storyteller doll ornament from Thelma Lujan; a silver eagle-feather pendant set with turquoise from silversmith Arthur Lujan, and a necklace of turquoise and silver beads from Arthur’s niece, Redhill Flower.
Sometimes the juxtaposition of ancient and modern, tourist and indigenous peoples seems jarring and exploitative. But I came away from Taos Pueblo with the impression that this was a people with a strong identity, a respect for the past, and a plan for going forward.

You’ll find more information about Taos Pueblo at the official Web site. http://www.taospueblo.com/about.php

Writer Rituals

I like hanging out with other writers. We usually begin by complaining about those things we CAN’T control—the price of necessities such as paper, ink, and food; the state of the publishing business; bad reviews or, worse, no reviews; rejection; spouses who expect that we actually make a living; and agents and editors who don’t put us at the center of their universe.
After we’ve worn that out, sometimes we discuss craft.

I like to ask my colleagues about their writing process, especially in those areas where we disagree (writer throw-down, anyone?)

I ask questions such as: Do you write in the early morning or the dead of night? Does your muse live at home, in a dedicated studio, at the beach, or at the local coffee shop? Do you write to music or demand silence? With or without chocolate? On the computer or in longhand on handmade paper? Mac or PC? Times New Roman or Courier?
Do you seek critique from others, or does early feedback kill your creative spirit? Do you like to travel in a pack or seek isolation?
Do you do extensive outlining and preparation before you sit down to write, or do you just launch, assuming it will somehow work out? Once you begin to write, do you write headlong, barely pausing to eat or sleep, or do you write for two hours and quit for the day? Is your daily word count 250? 500? 1000? 2000? Do you measure your progress in pages? Words? Time? Pounds of cashews?
When you revise, do you edit their original draft, or rewrite the thing entirely from the first paragraph? (that notion gives me the shivery-shudders, but that’s just me). Do you write the entire piece, and then revise? Or revise as you go?
Do you look forward to sitting down in front of your computer—hand-stitched journal—audio recorder—private stenographer—to write, or is it actually painful? Do you have to be “in the mood” or do you create your mood by forcing the issue, by sitting down and getting your hand moving?
Ask a few dozen successful writers the answers to these questions, and you’ll get many different answers. There is no one right way to write, and very few unbreakable rules. The wisdom of other writers can be helpful to you—but writing by its nature is a solitary endeavor. Each person has to find her own best method, and her own true path.

Hard Words

This weekend I’m thrilled to be at Kindling Words, a retreat for published authors, illustrators, and editors in Essex Junction, Vt. Nancy Werlin is leader of our author strand, and last night the noted author and illustrator Ashley Bryan was our keynote speaker.
Mr. Bryan read poetry, particularly some pieces by African-American poets. He read a poem by Eloise Greenfield, from her book, Honey I Love and Other Love Poems. I didn’t catch the title, but the gist of the poem was, I bought some candy, and now it’s gone, I built a sand castle, and now it’s gone, I wrote I poem and I still have that!
It reminded me of an epiphany I had recently when we visited the Morse Museum in Winter Park, FL. The Morse houses the country’s largest collection of Tiffany art glass and paintings.
Now, I’ll tell you right now—I’m into gaudy. And I mean gaudy in a good way. Those brilliant, layered, leaded, folded, enameled, iridescent glassworks give me goose-bumps. Not to mention the jewelry that grabs you by the throat and makes you take notice. I also love the idea that everyday objects can and should be beautiful, that all art shouldn’t be sequestered away in museums where you can’t get at it when you need the lift that fabulous art and design can provide.
There were photographs of interiors of homes Tiffany designed and decorated, including commissioned works as well as the family mansion in New York City and his estate, Laurelton, on Long Island. Some of the rooms were too busy to sleep in, but there was extravagant attention to detail.
The sad thing is, most of those buildings have since been burned or demolished. Much of the artwork at the Morse was rescued from torn down homes, churches, and public buildings.
And I was struck by the ephemeral nature of beautiful things, natural and man-made. Of course, there are beautiful natural and man-made wonders thousands and millions of years old. But when beautiful buildings and natural wonders get in the way of what we call “progress,” we tear them down. Hurricanes come through, and knock them down.
We writers deal with intangibles. Most people would consider words to be less substantial, say, than marble pillars. But both words and music are durable. They can be captured and preserved in myriad ways (more ways all the time).
That’s the wonder of great books and beautiful music: they can create beautiful imagery over and over again in the minds and hearts of people around the world. Of all the arts, they are renewable. The summer night or the broken panel of glass can’t be retrieved, but they can be recreated in the mind through music and prose. We can enter the garden any time we want by turning the page.

Kindling Words 2008

I’m leaving Vermont at the end of another Kindling Words. The hugs and kisses have been exchanged, the promises made, the connections that lie between us as writers reinforced, spun into tensile strength. It’s a web that extends from Tucson to Texas to New York City, from Iowa and Chicago to Florida and Atlanta. One of the blessings of the Internet is that we can find our kindred, wherever they are. But sometimes we just have to meet face to face.
For those of you who don’t know, Kindling Words is a conference/retreat for published writers, illustrators, and editors, where the focus is on craft and renewal. It’s a kind of cult ritual, an orgy of fellowship, a revival meeting (complete with spirituals sung about a bonfire) that heals and energizes. And lest you think we spent the whole time singing “Kumbaya,” our goddess presenters were Laurie Halse Anderson, (writers) Vera Williams (illustrators) and Cecile Goyette (editors).
Laurie spoke about the smack-down match between character and plot. We concluded that the relationship between character and plot is less a battle than an erotic, tangled embrace that births story (author fans self rapidly).
Laurie also hosted a lunchtime “white space” session on her “five-year plan,” subtitled (by me) Beyond Romance—How to Keep Body and Soul Together as a Full time Writer. It was practical advice for anyone who wants to make a living as a writer. I was especially impressed by her inclusion of volunteering and what she called “family drama” time in her plan for living.
I’m such a fan girl, and participants in the conference are so generous with their time. I attended Jane Yolen’s informal session on whether and how to find an agent, not because I am looking for an agent (hi, Christopher!), but because I just wanted to hang out in Jane’s room. Of course, I couldn’t help learning a lot from the plain-spoken Jane.
As important as the formal presentations is the opportunity to learn from true peers. They’ve often already solved the problems I’m wrestling with—even something as simple as how to resist the siren call of the Internet when you’re on deadline. Probably one of the most important lessons of KW is that there is no one right way to do things.
Some writers begin the writing process with character. Others with plot. Usually we start with the element we’re most comfortable with.
Some of us revise as we go along. Others of us vomit on the page, writing in a white heat until the bones of the story are down. Some of us love revision. Newbury-winner and keynote speaker Linda Sue Park said that writing is revision.
Speaking of Linda Sue, emblematic of this diversity of technique was the smack-down battle between Laurie and Linda. They disagreed on almost everything—and both are gifted, productive, genius writers.
On Saturday afternoon, the nine editors attending (including my own Arianne Lewin!) graciously answered our questions in a roundtable. More plain speech. As in any kind of therapy, first we have to be honest with each other.
That night, twenty geniuses shared their souls in five-minute increments during the candlelight readings. Themes ranged from incest to faeries to badger parenthood. Formats ranged from brilliant picture book rhymes to Green poetry to YA novel. At one point a choir of dissonant frogs emerged from the audience. It was that kind of night.
And, finally, the bonfire of wishes and dreams. We sang camp songs, folk songs, antiwar ballads, and show tunes. There is something elemental and primitive about assembling around a fire. It forges a connection that can carry us as missionaries into a world that sometimes seems bent on stomping on our souls.
I mean, I sang harmony with Gregory Maguire and actually felt in context.
Finally, we cast our prayers and dreams into the fire, watching the flames exhale them toward the stars, hoping to catch the ear of God.

I could write a whole blog of thank yous. Thank you to the mystic healer Alison James, who streams magic, to the wise Tanya Lee Stone, to Marnie Brooks, who called down blessings from the top of the stairs, to the always generous Nancy Werlin, to wise counselors Martha Levine, Mikki Knudsen, Laurie Calkhoven, and many others unnamed. Thanks to everyone who helped this happen.